Introduction
Stevenson left Weir of Hermiston unfinished at his death on 3 December 1894. It is a return to the Scottish setting of Kidnapped (1886) but now told in a more mature, subtle, ironic style. It is difficult to credit that he crafted this recreation of Scottish landscape, life and language while actually living in the blistering tropical heat of Samoa; and also while developing the tauter, leaner style he used in his powerfully realistic South Sea stories.
Weir is a lot lighter and daintier in tone than the South Seas stories, with their brutality and cynicism. There is something almost Jane Austenish about the opening with its broad confident sweeping description of the life and manners of the old Lord Justice-Clerk Adam Weir, and his wooing and marriage to the spinsterish Jean Rutherford, last descendant of the ‘riding Rutherfords of Hermiston’. There is a lovely rolling rhythm to Stevenson’s sentences.
The motives upon either side were much debated. Mr. Weir must have supposed his bride to be somehow suitable; perhaps he belonged to that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of women—an opinion invariably punished in this life. Her descent and her estate were beyond question. Her wayfaring ancestors and her litigious father had done well by Jean. There was ready money and there were broad acres, ready to fall wholly to the husband, to lend dignity to his descendants, and to himself a title, when he should be called upon the Bench. On the side of Jean, there was perhaps some fascination of curiosity as to this unknown male animal that approached her with the roughness of a ploughman and the aplomb of an advocate. Being so trenchantly opposed to all she knew, loved, or understood, he may well have seemed to her the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex. And besides, he was an ill man to refuse. A little over forty at the period of his marriage, he looked already older, and to the force of manhood added the senatorial dignity of years; it was, perhaps, with an unreverend awe, but he was awful. The Bench, the Bar, and the most experienced and reluctant witness, bowed to his authority—and why not Jeannie Rutherford? (Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)
The surviving portion of Weir of Hermiston consists of only nine chapters and fills just 100 pages of the 1987 OUP paperback edition, but it is full of light, gladsome descriptions. It feels like Stevenson can reel off sentences without effort or appeal, the prose dancing from his pen.
Kirstie was a woman in a thousand, clean, capable, notable; once a moorland Helen, and still comely as a blood horse and healthy as the hill wind.
(Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)
Part one – Edinburgh
Adam, the crusty old judge, and Jean, scion of the Rutherfords, marry and have a son, Archie. He is born in 1794 (100 years before the novel was being written). Archie is just seven years old when he begins to wonder whether his father, the harsh hanging judge, conforms to the milk- and-water piety his mother is always preaching – whether a harsh ranting hanging judge quite matches her description of the ideal Christian, who should be all forgiveness and the meekness of the lamb. Feeble Jean puts off Adam’s shrewd questions with Bible quotes and sayings but the sharp young lad notices the discrepancy in his parents’ beliefs.
And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied.
(Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)
It has been obvious to every reader of the novel that there is a lot of autobiography in Stevenson’s account of the rather weedy young boy growing up in the shadow of the forbiddingly confident, brash, booming father. Like Stevenson, young Archie Hermiston is sent through the conventional Edinburgh schools and starts to study law at the University when – The Big Incident happens.
Archie is 19 when he stops by the court where his father is hearing the case of a low vile murderer, a sorry apology of a wretch and his debased mistress. Archie watches his father condemn the man to death and finds every nerve in his body recoiling. Next day he goes along with the roaring crowd to watch the hanging and finds himself revolted and every instinct in his body rebelling. He cries out against it on the spot, overheard by only a few, but much compounds his sin by – that evening at the Edinburgh University debating society, of which he is a leading light – suggesting a debate condemning capital punishment as against God’s will.
This action causes a scandal, not only in its subversion of the existing laws which young Adam is supposed to be studying and supporting, but as a direct questioning of his father’s role and verdict in t his specific case.
Adam has acquired a mentor, a colleague of his father’s on the bench, a judge but a kindly and patient man, Lord Glenalmond. Archie calls round to see him that evening. Glenalmond has already got wind of the scandal but listens sympathetically to the young man’s objections, worries and doubts. And their conversation makes Archie guiltily realise just how profoundly he has insulted his father – in public – and brought scorn on the house.
This prepares us for the next scene where Archie steels himself to confront his father – who, predictably enough, storms against his son’s idiocy and foolishness. Archie is utterly repentant, head bowed. He offers to go as a soldier to ‘the Peninsular’ (the Peninsular War against Napoleon – if Adam is 19 this must be 1813). But his father points out that his rebellious streak unfits him for all dutiful professions. He will send him to the country estate at Hermiston to be the petty laird there, to run it on his (the Judge’s) behalf.
Part two – Hermiston
So begins the second part of the book, which begins with a lengthy description of the setting and personnel of the country house at Hermiston, descriptions of the house and country, the chief servant, 50-year-old Kirstie Elliott and her family.
Again, one can only marvel at Stevenson’s confident, thorough, sympathetic but measured and realistic evocation of a character.
Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother of their children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality.
(Chapter V – Winter on the Moors)
Kirstie’s brother, twenty years her senior, fathered four boys (Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew) and, belatedly, a girl, Christina – all living in the neighbouring valley of Cauldstaneslap. A long, stand-alone section describes the famous incident of the death of the old brother, ambushed and assaulted by thieves as he made his way drunkenly back from the market – how he made it to the family house, expiring on the doorstep, how his four grown sons jumped on their horses and tracked the attackers across heath and moor, finally bringing them to justice. The incident became the stuff of legend (strongly reminding me of the bloody family revenges at the core of the Norse sagas). The brothers, as a result, become known as The Black Brothers.
Archie settles into the country estate at Hermiston where he quickly wins the affection of mature Kirstie, followed by the other servants. Although aloof and sad, he strikes all the more a Byronic and attractive figure for that.
And so the scene is set for young Archie one day to spy the young Christina at the local church, a 50-seater kirk attended mostly by the staff from Hermiston and the households of the four brothers. His and Christina’s eyes meet and they fall in love.
It is a striking thing and new in Stevenson’s fiction that so much of this scene is told from Christina’s point of view, with a thorough description of her elaborate Regency clothes, and her equally complicated feelings. This really feels like a little bit of Jane Austen dropped into the Highlands and may be the first time Stevenson had attempted to portray a woman, a woman’s point of view, a woman’s feelings.
Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright. But the gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief. She looked away abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness. She knew what she should have done, too late—turned slowly with her nose in the air. And meantime his look was not removed, but continued to play upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose the girl. And Christina was conscious of his gaze—saw it, perhaps, with the dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets; she was conscious of changing colour, conscious of her unsteady breath. Like a creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she sought in a dozen ways to give herself a countenance. She used her handkerchief—it was a really fine one—then she desisted in a panic: “He would only think I was too warm.” She took to reading in the metrical psalms, and then remembered it was sermon-time. Last she put a “sugar-bool” in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step. It was such a homely-like thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high.
(Chapter VI – A Leaf from Christina’s Psalm-Book)
It has the sympathy for embarrassed youth of the mature man and the extremely confident writer.
Later the same evening Christina goes for a walk on the hills and there she spies young Archie rushing towards the pass into the valley of her family, coming looking for her. They meet amid the heather and have the earnest, embarrassed conversation of young lovers, sweet and innocent.
But Stevenson is not innocent. And for the first time begins to hint that this story will not end well. Some way into the conversation, Archie realises that they are talking not far from the tomb of his mother who died when he was a lad. The thought moves the poetic soul in him.
Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
(Chapter VI – A Leaf from Christina’s Psalm-Book)
Uh oh. Things move apace (as they do when Stevenson isn’t lumbered with his wordy collaborator, his step-son Lloyd Osbourne) and nemesis arrives promptly in the next chapter in the shape of a student Archie knew at Edinburgh. Like most of the students of the day he has gambled and drunk his money away, been forced to sell his law books and was on the verge of being sued by the bookseller when he fled his lodgings and took up the very vague invitation to visit him which Archie can’t actually remember ever having given. His name is Frank Innes.
Stevenson is a master at describing unease. From the start Archie and Frank don’t get along. Archie takes to disappearing immediately after breakfast, sometimes before, leaving his unwanted guest alone with the servants or to roam the grounds of the house or into the hills, bored and resentful. Frank falls in with the drinking clubs at the local village, Crossmichael, where he spitefully starts spreading rumours about aloof Archie and gives his host the catchy nickname of The Recluse.
Frank goes one, fatal, step further when he begins to wonder where Archie is disappearing off to so often and so early. Slowly he figures out that it is a woman. And when he next attends church he realises Archie is in love with the beautiful Christina. He proceeds to take his revenge by taunting Archie – mockingly advising him not to get involved with ‘a local milkmaid’, warning him of the likely fury of Christina’s brothers and the scorn of the neighbourhood once his secret is out; all the time assuming a hypocritical concern for Archie’s well-being when in fact he is deliberately, sadistically torturing and humiliating him.
That night they go their separate ways to bed, Archie to burn with humiliation at hearing his lady love so scorned and taken lightly, Frank to savour his revenge for what he takes to be Archie’s superiority and neglect of him. And Stevenson, in the character of the intrusive narrator, points the doomward direction of his tale.
Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer waned.
(Chapter VII – Enter Mephistopheles)
The penultimate chapter (A Nocturnal Visit) consists entirely of old Kirstie – who has been missing Archie’s company and conversation now he is off visiting Christina all the time – coming to his rooms one evening and having a painful conversation in which she warns him against risking his own and Christina’s reputations with his dalliance.
Kirstie – in the earlier descriptions of her mastery of the household, and her fond feelings for the young laird when he first arrives, and now in her conflicted feelings about seeing her young hero fall in love – emerges as in some ways the most sympathetic character in the book. Certainly I feel warmer about her – and about the wicked old hanging judge – than I do about either of the naive young lovers.
So now Archie has been warned twice – once by the ill-intentioned Frank, once by well-intentioned Kirstie – to have a care.
The last completed chapter (Chapter IX – At The Weaver’s Stone) follows logically. At his due appointment with Christina next day, beside the stone tomb in the hills known locally as the weaver’s stone, Archie nerves himself to tell his beloved they must cool their love. But, being young and naive, Stevenson brilliantly describes how maladroit and clumsily he phrases a reasonable suggestion, particularly when he makes the fatal (and quite amusing) mistake of invoking the name of his father, the old Judge. Oh dear. Christina, nerved up to expect more lover’s sweet talk, is at first hurt and wounded, the tears springing to her eyes; but when Archie brings his father and the opinions of others into it – oops, she bridles and becomes angry. She says he is taunting her, she never realised he was so in thrall to convention etc. And then she bursts into hopeless sobbing tears and he rushes to embrace her.
And that is where the manuscript breaks off. Stevenson dictated this last scene to his step-daughter on the morning he died.
Doubling and division
The introduction to the 1987 Oxford University Press edition, by Emma Letley, goes long on the idea of doubles and dualities. This is because Weir is paired in this edition with Stevenson’s most famous fiction, Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, which naturally suggests the notion of the double.
The trouble with this idea is that once you start looking for binary oppositions in almost any fiction, you can find them everywhere, in evermore feeble and unconvincing iterations. So, here:
- Strong old Adam Weir is set against his son, the sensitive young Archie Weir. There’s a binary division right there.
- Old Adam Weir, his fellow law lords and the students at Edinburgh Uni are bourgeois; the four Black Brothers are rough crude country folk.
- The book contrasts English speakers with Scots speakers so that good honest Kirstie Elliott speaks broad Scots, sly scheming Frank speaks dandified English.
- More peripherally, many of the folk heroes – legendary figures referred to throughout the text – are ambiguous figures, reverenced by country folk and yet law-breakers in their own time.
If you throw in the historic conflicts between the Puritan Covenanter movement and the broader Protestantism of the Scottish cities, and then start quoting the use of masks or personas in the work of Robert Burns or Douglas Hogg, you can fill many pages waxing lyrical about the centrality of doubles and divisions in Scots literature, and then confidently situate Stevenson in that tradition.
I am not persuaded. If you take two of the characters and contrast them – bingo! – binary opposites – as further examples, the Angry judge Weir and the Compassionate judge Glenalmond; the male Archie (and Frank) and female Christina (or Kirstie); the Father Adam and the Son Archie; the Old Adam and the Young Archie. Judge Adam is stern; his wife Jeannie is soft. And so on and on.
But the reality is that there are about a dozen fleshed-out characters in the novel and they are placed in multifarious relations with each other, relationships which jostle and hustle against each other and which also – as is kind of the point of the novel – change and develop.
And the interesting bit, the attractive bit of the text, isn’t the static categories (old, young, Scots-speaking, English-speaking, town, country blah blah blah) – it is the much more subtle growth and change and development of the characters which is caused by changing events, their changing perceptions, their changing relations to each other. the novel and its characters are far more rich and strange than the harping on doubles doubles doubles allows.
Style – dry comedy
Dry This richness is caught in the subtle flexibility of Stevenson’s style. I’ve already pointed out its dry, Austenish irony, his mature, deflating, amused familiarity with the types he is describing:
The old ‘riding Rutherfords of Hermiston,’ of whom she was the last descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill subjects, and ill husbands to their wives though not their properties.
‘… though not their properties’ lol.
Bathetic punchlines Stevenson regularly uses classic antithesis, the balancing of two clauses, to make the second one end with a thumping comic bathos.
In the early stages I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass.
Comic misunderstanding There is a particularly laugh-out-loud moment when the harsh Judge is riding back from Edinburgh to Hermiston and is met by Kirstie keening by the side of the road, all geared up to tell him with maximum emotional distress that his wife, Jeannie, has died.
It was the lowering nightfall when my lord returned. He had the sunset in his back, all clouds and glory; and before him, by the wayside, spied Kirstie Elliott waiting. She was dissolved in tears, and addressed him in the high, false note of barbarous mourning, such as still lingers modified among Scots heather.
‘The Lord peety ye, Hermiston! the Lord prepare ye!’ she keened out. ‘Weary upon me, that I should have to tell it!’
He reined in his horse and looked upon her with the hanging face.
‘Has the French landit?’ cried he.
Style – adjectives
On a really local level, I began to notice Stevenson’s use of multiple adjectives or sets of adjectival phrasers, often with a surprise in the tail.
She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no blood of life in her, no grasp or gaiety; pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and incompetent.
The house lasses were at the burnside washing, and saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait.
This atmosphere of his father’s sterling industry was the best of Archie’s education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the boy’s life.
Above all, it is the articulacy – it is the ability to deploy his Scots prose to give expression to psychological insights into his characters and by extension into human nature more broadly, which illuminate the reader’s mind. Which make a deeper, richer perception possible. It is the often unexpected nature of the insights, their counter-intuitive placing, which makes them all the more powerful
Lord Hermiston was coarse and cruel; and yet the son was aware of a bloomless nobility, an ungracious abnegation of the man’s self in the man’s office.
I can see why ‘the Master’, Henry James, genuinely admired Stevenson. The way he was for so long perceived as a ‘children’s writer’ conceals the flexibility, fluency and psychological insights which abound in his work.
Related links
- Weir of Hermiston on Project Gutenberg
- Weir of Hermiston Wikipedia article
- Robert Louise Stevenson website
- Robert Louis Stevenson titles available online
A Stevenson bibliography
1878
An Inland Voyage – An immensely entertaining, witty and thoughtful account of Stevenson’s trip by canoe, with a friend, along the canals of Belgium and south into France, observing rural life and types along the way.
1879
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – More gritty than the Voyage, the Travels record 12 days walking with a recalcitrant donkey through south-central France in a book which has moments of freewheeling nature worship but comes to be dominated by Stevenson’s interest in the bloody Protestant revolt which took place in the region a century earlier.
1881
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers – Essays including: Virginibus Puerisque i-iv including ‘On Falling in Love’, Crabbed Age and Youth, An Apology for Idlers, Ordered South, Aes Triplex, El Dorado, The English Admirals, Some Portraits by Raeburn, Child’s Play, Walking Tours, Pan’s Pipes, A Plea for Gas Lamp.
1882
The Old and New Pacific Capitals – Essays on the climate and history of Monterey and San Francisco.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books – Essays on: Victor Hugo’s Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Yoshida-Torajiro, François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, John Knox and his Relations to Women.
New Arabian Nights – A sequence of thinly-linked and not too impressive short stories.
1883
Treasure Island – One of the most famous adventure stories of all time. Andrew Lang says it single-handedly established the financial viability of a new type of short, action-packed story and inaugurated a golden age of adventure yarns from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Rider Haggard.
The Silverado Squatters – Another travel book, following immediately after the Atlantic crossing described in An Amateur Emigrant and the trans-America train journey described in The Open Plains, this one describes Stevenson and new wife Fanny’s honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp high on the flanks of Mount St Helena, north of San Francisco.
1885
Prince Otto – An action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter – co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson
A Child’s Garden of Verses Classic volume of children’s poetry.
1886
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – One of the most famous fictions of all time about an Edinburgh scientist who devises a potion which releases his unconscious urges, his animal self, an alter ego which threatens to take over his personality.
Kidnapped – Gripping historical novel about young David Balfour plunged into a series of adventures in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
1887
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables – Six short stories: The Merry Men, Will O’ the Mill, Markheim, Thrawn Janet, Olalla, The Treasure of Franchard.
On the Choice of a Profession – An essay.
Underwoods (poetry)
Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (poetry)
1888
The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses – Historical adventure novel set during the Wars of the Roses as young Master Richard Shelton escapes from his wicked ‘uncle’ and rescues the girl he loves, young Joanna Sedley.
1889
The Master of Ballantrae – Two brothers end up on opposite sides of Bonny Prince Charlie’s rebellion of 1745, the Master being the one who goes into exile and adventures in America and India before returning to haunt the stay-at-home brother, until both are driven to a macabre and gruesome fate in the New World.
The Wrong Box – Comic novel mostly written by his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, but revised by Stevenson.
1890
Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu Stevenson’s angry defence of Father Damien, Catholic priest to the leper colony on the island of Molokai, against a detractor.
1891
The Bottle Imp – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a magic bottle and the love of two South Sea island natives.
Ballads – poems
1892
The Wrecker (co-written with Lloyd Osbourne) – An immensely long rambling narrative telling the life story of American Loudon Dodds, from his days as a failed art student in Paris, to his business ventures with brash Jim Pinkerton in San Francisco, to the long puzzling case of the shipwrecked Flying Scud whose mystery dominates the second half of the book and, in the final pages, reveals a gruesome and bloody tragedy at sea.
The Beach of Falesá – (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) A powerful short story about a rough white trader and the harsh revenge he takes on the fellow trader who tries to get him expelled from the island.
A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa – factual history
Across the Plains – Travelogue following straight on from The Amateur Emigrant (which describes RLS’s 1879 journey by steamship from Glasgow to New York) and describes his ongoing journey by train from New York to California.
1893
The Isle of Voices – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a lazy South Sea islander who falls foul of his father-in-law who is a warlock with magic powers.
Catriona, aka David Balfour – A sequel to Kidnapped.
Island Nights’ Entertainments (aka South Sea Tales) – Contains the three stories referred to above.
1894
The Ebb-Tide – A novella, the third collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, describing the ill-fated trip of three beach bums at the ends of their tethers, who unexpectedly get the opportunity to crew a schooner, plan to steal and sell it, but then meet their nemesis in the shape of a supernaturally powerful white trader.
—-December 1894 Stevenson dies, aged 44, on the South Sea Island of Vailima—-
1895
Vailima Letters – 44 letters Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, who published them with a preface and epilogue.
The Amateur Emigrant – A short intense account of Stevenson’s journey across the Atlantic in 1879, with descriptions of the squalid conditions of ‘steerage’ class passengers and reflections on the condition and character of the British working classes.
1896
Weir of Hermiston – Unfinished at Stevenson’s death, this fragment of nine chapters describes the childhood and young manhood of Archie Weir, sensitive son of the hanging judge old Adam Weir, how his father removes him from Edinburgh University for his subversive views and exiles him to the country estate of Hermiston where he falls in love with a local beauty, Christina Elliott – at which point a student acquaintance comes to stay, who it is hinted will become Archie’s bitter love rival – and the manuscript breaks off. Contains much mature and insightful portrayal of its characters especially, for the first time in Stevenson’s fiction, of its women characters.
In the South Seas – A collection of articles and essays describing Stevenson’s travels in the Pacific islands.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses – Poetry.
Records of A Family of Engineers – A personal history of his own family of lighthouse-building engineers, unfinished at his death.
1897
St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England – A long novel which Stevenson had almost completed and was finished after his death by Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Books & Boots 